As appears customary with these things, my inaugural post is going to be about the platform underpinning the blog itself. Perhaps, less conventional however, is the platform choice itself: Github Gists.
Hopefully this will make for a more interesting read than the usual Jekyll, Hugo, Wordpress, walled-garden gumpf or js-bloated-blog-de-jour gibberish.
If you're here reading this you probably already know a thing or two about Github Gists. Being relatively sane however, you've probably never considered using them for blogging.
Let me tell share some of the reasons why it might not be an altogether terrible idea:
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Your audience is already here: If you're a developer, writing about technical topics, then there's probably no larger population center of potential readers and commenters than on Github. That said, if you're predominantly blogging about Gardening or your Pet Turtle 'Speed Bump', you might be better served elsewhere.
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Out-of-the-box comments: No more fiddling with third-party comment systems Disqus, commento or whathaveyou!
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Markdown ftw!: I'm not going to waste my time telling you how awesome and convenient Markdown is. I'll just let you know that rich formatting, images and even Mermaid diagrams are supported in Gists.
pie title Pets owned by developers
"Turtles" : 1
"Cats" : 85
"Dogs" : 14
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Git power: You know Git? Yeah, the thing you use for versioning your HTML codez. Well, it's useful for keeping a history of your blog too: make edits, revisions, and even collaborate with your pals.
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Easy authoring: Use the text editor and git workflow of your choice. Personally, I'm using Visual Studio Code, GistPad Extension and Markdown Preview for a really tidy and familiar writing experience.
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Robust infra: If Github is unreachable we probably all have much bigger things to worry about!
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Limited Customization: If you're a design enthusiast or just love to endlessly scroll through page after page of near identical looking SquarePress templates you might miss the customization options available on other platforms.
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S.E-NO: Yeah, nah you can't really do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a per-post basis 🤷🏻. So your content might not reach as wide an audience as it would on specialized platforms.
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Analytics: Here we depart from the conventional practice. Picture a landscape where composition is uninhibited by the pursuit of click-through rates and visitor counts. Here, the focal point is without question the crux of content and the synergy of minds. It’s a tribute to the ethos of a web that fosters enriched discourse. Or, to put more bluntly, Analytics suck! and you don't need them on you Dev Blog. Be serious.
All joking aside, in the past I've been derailed in my blogging endeavours by (as programmers are inclined to do) becoming overly concerned with the underlying technology. I think I will be a more effective, and prolific blogger if I can remove the distractions of overbaked platforms, focus on writing and leverage the same tools I use in my day job.
Will you consider Gists for your next blog? Let me know what you think.
Regardless, please keep an eye out for more posts from me – probably not about Gists or Blogging platforms – in the near future.
Thanks for reading !